Get the barbecue out, it's Yeezy Season
https://consequenceofsound.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/kanye-west-al-day-explicit.wav?_=1
I don't care what the weather's doing out there. We got a CDQ of a track off of So Help Me God, so it's time to get grilling. In this absolutely gigantic year for music - the second coming of 2007, really - this is still my #1 most hyped album. Hell, this was probably my most hyped single track... between all the snippets that leaked, and then the awesome live performance, this was probably the single track I most wanted to hear.
And wow yes this is a banger. This is pure fire. This is whatever words you need to use to describe a song like this. Like, it's a song you play loud because everybody likes it and can sing along, and then you get all turnt up with some collective energy, and you just wanna wild tf out and you feel like you can do anything. It's that kinda song. But what you really need to focus on, I think, is the number of insights Kanye had to have had to make this song, and just how brilliant each of them are. Like, the beat is this little Paul McCartney riff. How he heard that and realized that he could get this roaring grimey snarl out of it is unfathomable.
He completely wrecks it, too, with some of the tightest and smartest bars we've heard from him in years. I loved the lyrical style on Yeezus, and how it seemed necessary with the overall spontaneity of the project, but now he's going in and saying all these hilarious and amazing things with the same level of spontaneity, the same sense of them just exploding out. And oh man like: "You an actor, you should be on Broadway, nigga/Cause you do shit the broad way, nigga/your bitch got an ass but my broad way thicker", like, how is it that he's always the first to come up with a line like this? Or or "24/7 365 days everybody gettin paid/Niggas lookin at me like I'm worth both MJs/People saying "Ye, ye, take it easy"/20Gs for the Yeezys off of eBay/Niggas do the most and they ain't done shit/only way I can sum it up, son of a bitch", like, wow, that's a Young Thug level of understanding of sonic/rhythmic dualities.
Then you got these Theophilus London adlibs and Allan Kingdom blessing the bridge... these things don't function through the contrast, it isn't a sort of "wow the juxtaposition is so crazy, how does it work?" feeling, it just works. It goes double when we cut into the original McCartney song - it's like, didn't you really feel like something like that should happen? It feels like... some bomb has gone off, and you pull back to the lone survivor, walking triumphantly out into the sunset - all the best aspects of the "Blueprint 2" beat. Okay but then it's also this sense of like... the song has already anticipated its own catchiness, and shows you a second "rendering" of itself, which predicts (prolly actually) your response to it - that you'll be whistling or humming it all day. Like, do you get what I mean? By showing the same melody in two "contexts", it doubles down on its own addictiveness... it's pretty interesting... it's like when they bundle the soundtrack of a movie with the DVD, maybe... but it's all in the same project? It sort of makes it iconic within its own universe? Hard to get into words. And oh man, after that, when it explodes back into a Yeezus-style electronic assault, it's like, defying your ability to actually encapsulate the song, possibly multiple times in that section, repeatedly denying it... overall, the song seems to be saying "you aren't ready for this song, but you're still gonna listen to it all day".
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